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Theatrical quilt sewn from seldom-seen Tennessee Williams works

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CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - From the recent Broadway revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" to next summer's Kennedy Center festival featuring "Cat," "Streetcar Named Desire," "The Glass Menagerie" and other works, 20th century American playwright Tennessee Williams has once again become a hot property.

"There is definitely a resurgence of interest in Williams," said Tom Mitchell, a theater professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and creator of "Caged Hearts," a new theatrical production that stitches together scenes from five of Williams' early, seldom-produced plays with narrative drawn from letters and reviews. The premiere performance of Mitchell's theatrical mélange will take place Feb. 13 in conjunction with an international conference, Feb. 12-14, in St. Louis. The conference, "Tennessee Williams: The Secret Year," is hosted by Washington University.

"The St. Louis symposium is neat," Mitchell said, "because it's right there where Williams lived - his parents' home was adjacent to the campus."

Seven undergraduate and graduate students from the theater department at Illinois will be featured in "Caged Hearts." The following day, they will share their talents and skills with middle school students in East St. Louis, as participants in a program associated with the university's East St. Louis Action Research Project. The students will perform scenes from "Caged Hearts" and lead the children in theater games and exercises.

Mitchell said he created "Caged Hearts" to serve as an introduction to the work Williams produced as a budding writer between 1935 and 1940, before hitting it big in 1944 with "The Glass Menagerie."

The idea to put together a performance featuring scenes from these early plays occurred to Mitchell a few years ago, on the heels of another gathering of Williams scholars - at Illinois. For that conference, Mitchell directed a group of acting students in the performance of scenes from "Stairs to the Roof," "Not About Nightingales," "Fugitive Kind," "Spring Storm" and "Candles to the Sun."

Each of the plays was unpublished - and had rarely been produced - at the time of Williams' death in 1983. That changed in 1998 with the release, by Williams' longtime publisher, New Directions, of an edited edition of "Not About Nightingales." Over the next few years, New Directions began issuing edited versions of the entire collection of early plays; to date, all but "Candles" has been published. Three of the five books in the series were edited by noted Williams scholar Allean Hale, an adjunct professor of theater at Illinois; Hale also contributed introductory texts to the books.

"The scenes Tom presented at the conference here were very enthusiastically received," said Hale, who served as a consultant to Mitchell on the "Caged Hearts" project. That included assisting him with the title choice.

"The title comes from a statement in the introduction to 'Stairs,' " she said. "It referred to workers living in cages. Tom was working to find a title that fit all of the plays. All of them had characters living in situations where they were driving to get out."

Hale and Mitchell are both among the featured speakers on the program at the St. Louis conference. Hale, who also mapped out a tour of the city's historic Williams sites, will address the topic of "Tennessee Williams' Saint Louis Blues."

"Williams always said he hated St. Louis, for many reasons, which I will outline in my talk," said Hale. "But in the long run, he spent more time in St. Louis than anywhere else, and more of his material came from St. Louis."

Mitchell's conference talk will focus on "The Challenges and Satisfactions of Staging the Early Plays of Tennessee Williams."

"One of the challenges," he said, "is that there are variant versions of the scripts. Because Williams wasn't a careful writer, sorting through all the variations can be tedious." It's not unusual, Mitchell said, to find discrepancies in details such as a character's dress or a location.

Still, directing a Williams play can be rewarding, he said. "They're often a little over the top - emotionally and dramatically. But I'm an acting teacher and I think it's great acting material. It has complex characters in heightened circumstances." Mitchell added that his students seem to relate to the characters in Williams early plays "because they're the same age as the characters and because of the Midwestern connection."

Following its debut in St. Louis, "Caged Hearts" will be performed at Illinois on Feb. 25, in a single performance at the university's Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. The show goes on the road again a few weeks later, when it will be presented on March 24 at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival.